I’m sure it will come as no surprise to anyone who read the sad story of my Amazon.com calendar purchase, that I also buy a lot of books. My friend Dawn, mentioned frequently around these parts, pointed out an internet forward that kinda-sorta reminded her of me. It went something like this:

I have nothing to add to this.

This brings me to confessional time. I’m pretty sure every post I make here is something of an accidental confessional, but this is on purpose…not just me blathering on about personal stuff and TMI.

I have a lot of books I haven’t read yet. I used to read SSSSOOOOOO much. All the time. I called in sick to work every now and again if I had a book I couldn’t wait to read. I missed most of elementary, middle, and, come to think of it, high school. One of my childhood besties and I used to walk to Park Drugs, and sometimes I bought a book instead of candy or beverages. Candy and beverages was the entire point of the exercise, btw.

Side note: I can’t believe I’m admitting this, but in 5th or 6th grade one of the books I bought from Park Drugs, with my own money even, was a time travel romance that still makes me question my own taste in reading material. Constance O’Day-Flannery entertained me well enough with her Timeless Passion, and I learned a little bit about 1856 antebellum plantation living to boot! I also learned that if I wind up traveling back in time, it would be indiscrete to listen to my jammin’ walkman tunes while singing Huey Lewis out loud. My “husband” might think I’m cray-cray, or I might be drowned in the swamp in order to free the demon spirits.

It’s always a concern. One can never be too careful while time traveling.

So, I was somewhat preoccupied with reading not so many years ago is what I’m saying. Then BAM! Procreation. Along with the precious babies came regressing literacy.

Fast forward to last month and I went to the SENG Conference in Milwaukee. I had a great time and on the last day I couldn’t help myself any longer…I bought some books from the vendor hall. Great Potential Press had a few books that had been on my wish list for years. Literally. Years. What the crap; they were giving my books away at the conference! All I had to do was pay 70 percent of the cover price and I could take them home with me for FREE. That’s all there was to it.

How could I say no? I couldn’t. I didn’t.

Trouble here is that I already have a robust library of gifted-specific books, but I haven’t even read close to half of them. Homeschooling? Have a bunch of those too. Aspergers? Check.

Now these shelves of books aren’t going to remind me that my devilishly handsome plantation-farming faux husband from 1856 might not understand about OTC pharmaceuticals, but they might, just might, help me parent my extremely high needs children. Constance O’Day-Flannery didn’t write about twice-exceptional kids, but if she did I might have to put her book to the top of the TBR pile. As it is, I spend all day with my quirky, intense, always “on” spawn, so I don’t want to relax with some helpful reading material about them when I could be watching Toddlers & Tiaras, or getting my ass beat at SongPop.

3. Decided at the conference, while standing in the vendor hall, to start *reading* and then *reviewing* the books on my blog.

4. Went home and lost track of time. Got my ass beat at SongPop.

5. My conference roomie’s book was released, and she’s unknowingly written about my life. All of it!! She, too, noted that the last thing a person wants to do is read a book about gifted kids when they’re knee deep in the soup.

5b. I bought LOTS of copies of Jen’s book and planned it to be my kick-off gifted book review / combo kick-off contest.

6. Dawn posted about tsundoku (see above) which reminded me that I planned to read and review all of my gifted/homeschooling/2e books, but haven’t started yet.

6b. Nor have I announced the contest.

7. I’ve been drinking tea ALLLL NIGHT and now I can’t sleep.

8. So it’s time to launch this contest. WOOHOO!

9. But I think I should create a new entry because this one is really long already.

My house is a pigsty, I re-realized this morning, while we were feeling somewhat restless in each other’s orbits.

Jeff eventually took the kids to the beach, and I said I was going to stay home and clean the barn we call home. Like the scrubby kind of cleaning, where you vacuum the vents, use products, and everything.

I was obsessing over blog stuff before they cleared out, metablogging if you will, and read to the kids a list of countries from which my international friends are checking in. Since February 25, I’ve had readers from 70 different countries. That’s surprising to me.

Then they started showing up at my house. It was really awkward.

The kids are into geography. We have 13 maps on the walls of our main living space. We kinds/sorta homeschool on weekends and holidays to make up for all the goofing and video game playing “we” do on “school” days. And Target shopping. And Costco visits. And all-day play dates, parties, and park days. And, well…maybe we don’t homeschool so much as we live our lives with curious minds. They suck everything in. Especially free samples.

I don’t think he really loves me. He just wants me to spend $300 on frozen lasagna and toilet paper. Costco sells over a billion rolls per year. Saw it in a documentary.

Geography of Vanity lesson done for the day, I was then looking at my most popular post stats. Far and away, Chuck Norris is the winner. He brought in almost 1200 readers, while my second place maternity pants invited only 200. That one is only a couple of days old, so maybe I should give it time.

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N wanted to see if he could find my blog using Chuck Norris keywords. We think it’s funny that Chuck Norris really does win at everything, even a popularity contest between crap in swimming pools and a pair of pants.

You think it’s a joke, but it’s true. Chuck is badass.

With a couple of tweaks, N found my blog and proceeded to correct my grammar and spelling on old posts, to which E commented “You made all those mistakes in front of everyone!”

Let’s go with annoyed and secretly proud, too. Then let’s also go with an opening bid of $12.50 for the both of them.

These guys are Damned. Lucky. I’m their mom. Far better people than I would have had them breaking rocks by the roadside by now. Maybe even in a chain gang. Instead, I kicked them out of the house.

Precedent set. This kid corrected his mom’s grammar and spelling too.

So, while they were gone, I cyberstalked people online, took a few hours to nap in the middle of the day, made up conversations between the cats *with* the cats, got the brush-off from my mom on the phone, cried the rest of the afternoon because my mom was cheating on me with my other sister… Then began cleaning the house about an hour before I figured the boys would be home.

Sometimes the conversations are short, so we just make beautiful music together instead.

Apparently it looked like I got a lot done.

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“It looks like you got a lot done,” Jeff said. He must have really low expectations for my domestic skills.

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It’s pretty shortsighted for me to be admitting this in print, seeing as now he knows how much I can get done in an hour or less. I only got one room done, but Jaysus H., the Queen of England could suck soup out of the carpet, it’s so clean in here.

Assume the position, Betsy, or there will be no soup for you!(nods to Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi)

Speaking of weird visuals, N informed me before they left for the day:

“E found a glitch in Minecaft! He discovered a way for all the animals to lose their torsos. They’re just legs and floating heads. The sheep also lost their faces! They walk around and graze just fine, so it doesn’t look like they mind.”

Bwahaha Ditto on your base.

And a Chuck Norris fact I hadn’t known before today:

“Chuck Norris’ iPod came with a real charger instead of just a USB cord.”

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OMG I wonder if he took the sheep’s faces, and all the other animal’s torsos?

I’ve been away for awhile. Not in jail or the looney bin or anything, but things got busy and all of a sudden more than a year went by. I fully intended to resurrect the blog on the one year anniversary of the last post, but I think we can all deal with that particular deadline coming and going. If you can’t hang with my tardiness, we probably shouldn’t be pretend online friends anymore. Just saying. Read the rest of this entry »

I was reading someone’s blog a couple of weeks ago and have been thinking about ripping off her idea. This blogger set a challenge for herself to blog every single day until her 40th birthday, which for her was less than a year. I’ll be 36 in July (I had to ask Jeff how old I am–sad), so that’s too many years of committment. Therefore… (drumroll, please) Read the rest of this entry »

I actually started a blog on another site, but haven’t updated or even visited it in over 6 months. There were some very thought provoking posts relating to my family and homeschool life, which are lost to us forever…because I can’t remember where they are! I could troll through my e-mail archives and hopefully discover my former blog’s address, but that would be like a bad digital episode of A&E’s “Hoarders”. Thousands and thousands of unread messages are mixed in with notes from friends, and every newsletter from every museum within 500 miles from the last two years—amongst other spam and whatnot. All that’s missing is a 4 foot pile of poopy adult diapers in the “trash” and twenty cats pooping all over my inbox.

Besides, my old blog was a total a$$hole. I’m glad it’s gone.

So, here I am…turning over a new leaf. I don’t care that it’s because I can’t find my old leaf. If you were homeschooling two boys like mine you wouldn’t be able to find your leaf either.